Kyffhausen Castle

The summit was occupied long before any castle stood on it: trenches cut in the Oberburg in 1937 and 1938 struck the remains of an early Iron Age fortification of the sixth or fifth century BC, its dry-stone wall running further down the slope than the medieval walls ever did.

The beginnings of the medieval castle are largely unresolved, because the written sources start late and stay sparse. Its purpose is not in doubt: it administered and secured the extensive imperial estate of the southern Harz foreland and the Goldene Aue, and it covered the imperial palace of Tilleda two kilometres away. Ceramics from the Oberburg, assessed by Wolfgang Timpel, place the earliest of the three castles in the first half of the 11th century and possibly as early as the 10th, and construction is generally set in the reign of Henry IV. To the Salian period also belongs the foundation of a castle chapel against the southern ring wall, identified in 2023.

The castle enters the written record only in 1118, and it does so being destroyed. In the fighting between the Saxon princes and Emperor Henry V that followed his defeat at Welfesholz in 1115, the Saxon duke Lothar of Supplinburg took the castrum Cuphese from a garrison holding it for the king. Burnt layers found at several points in the Unterburg were long read as the mark of that assault. They are no longer tied to 1118; instead the eastern part of the Unterburg is now thought to have been thrown up in that year as a siege work against the Oberburg above it.

Rebuilding followed quickly and on a large scale, begun in all likelihood while Lothar of Supplinburg himself reigned as king and completed under Frederick I Barbarossa. Whether Barbarossa ever climbed to Kyffhausen during his stays at Tilleda, as in 1174, can only be guessed at, and no ruler's visit is attested at the castle in this period. Through the 12th and 13th centuries the three adjoining castles reached the height of their importance, measured in the number and quality of the buildings raised and in the metalwork recovered from the Oberburg, including partly gilded bronze and copper objects. Those named in the sources from the middle of the 12th century to the first half of the 13th are not emperors but imperial ministeriales, among them the later lords of Mildenstein, who administered the castle and its table estate.

The walls were raised in Kyffhäuser sandstone, already pale red, and in the Hohenstaufen period were given at least two further coats of red-tinted plaster wash, traced on the ring walls in the 1930s and again in 1995. Red distinguished other imperial castles and Barbarossa's foundations, among them the Rote Spitzen at Altenburg; it signalled the imperial builder, and on a ridge stripped of its trees it will have magnified the castle's effect enormously.

What the Hohenstaufen left is not one castle but three, divided by cross-ditches and called the Oberburg, Mittelburg and Unterburg, together more than 600 metres long and some 60 wide, which makes the site one of the largest castle complexes in Germany. The Oberburg evidently served as the core, and its square keep, the Barbarossa tower, still stands 17 metres high on masonry three metres thick, with two residential storeys that show it was lived in as well as defended.

By the end of the 13th century the castle had lost its strategic value to the kingship, and it changed hands repeatedly thereafter. When the counts of Rothenburg, who held the burgraviate, died out, Rudolf of Habsburg, elected King of the Romans in 1273, granted the office of royal burgrave to Count Friedrich V of Beichlingen. In 1375 the counts of Beichlingen had to take Kyffhausen as a fief from the Wettin landgraves of Thuringia, and in 1378 the landgrave pawned Kyffhausen and the neighbouring Rothenburg to the counts of Schwarzburg for 970 marks. A right of repurchase was agreed and never made good: neither castle came back into Thuringian hands. In 1407 the counts of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt took the fief and displaced the Beichlingen line.

By then there was little left to hold. The Thuringian chronicle of Johannes Rothe, who died in 1434, calls Kyffhausen a wustes sloz, a waste castle. Only the chapel of the Unterburg was put back into use, consecrated in 1433 to the Holy Cross as a pilgrimage chapel; burials around it and finds of pilgrim badges show the traffic it drew. The pilgrimage centre lost its importance with the Reformation at the latest, and from the 15th century the hill served chiefly as a quarry. Cutting for millstones consumed most of the Mittelburg, leaving parts of a rectangular and a round tower and too little to date them or say what they were for.

The mountain then acquired a story that outran its history. The legend of Frederick Barbarossa asleep in the mountain spread further in print, among other places in a chapbook of 1519, and alongside it came a run of so-called false Fredericks; the best known was a tailor from Langensalza who in 1546 gave himself out as the emperor and held court in the castle ruins. From the age of Weimar Classicism, and more strongly in the Romantic era, the ruins drew writers: Goethe walked the range with Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar in 1776, and Friedrich Rückert published his poem Der alte Barbarossa in 1817. Burschenschaft fraternities met at the ruin between 1846 and 1848.

Building of the Kyffhäuser Monument on the Oberburg from 1890 destroyed more than two thirds of the oldest of the three castles, though several medieval buildings survived at its western end. The same work brought the castle's buried well back to light, a shaft driven 176 metres into the rock and among the deepest on any medieval castle site in central Europe; when it was sunk cannot be established with certainty, though it is taken to belong only to the castle's last building phase, and a proposed date of 1140 to 1180, argued from the castle's importance in those years, stands without parallel and looks the less likely of the two. In 1900 the Kyffhäuserbund, an association of veterans and reservists, took its name from the site. The castle belonged to the principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt until the November Revolution of 1918, and thereafter to the Free State of Thuringia.

In 1934 the Deutscher Reichskriegerbund, which owned the ground, began clearing and conserving the parts of the medieval castle the monument had spared, so that they could be opened to the public. The excavations this required, in the Unterburg from 1934 to 1936 and in the Oberburg in 1937 and 1938, were directed by Gotthard Neumann, the state trustee for prehistoric and early historic antiquities in Thuringia. The clearance was finished in 1938 with the Reich Labour Service and numerous volunteers, under heavy time pressure; some loss of scientific quality was unavoidable, yet the digs still produced the essential evidence for how the castles were built and fitted out.

The work did not go undisturbed. The excavators fell into serious disagreement with representatives of the Reichskriegerbund over how the prehistoric fortification and settlement remains should be interpreted, and Heinrich Himmler and the Ahnenerbe research association he founded in 1935 pressed increasingly for influence over the investigation. The prehistoric material was published in full by the excavators in 1940; the medieval building history and the numerous and in part outstanding medieval finds still await publication.

The exposed ruins were secured and partly rebuilt in masonry, work that left the Unterburg the best preserved of the three, its ring wall standing almost unbroken to ten metres. There were said to be plans at the end of the Second World War to blow up the monument, which would have taken much of the castle ruin with it. Consolidation continued through the GDR years and was stepped up again after 1990, with further small excavations and structural research on the Barbarossa tower. Hermann Wäscher led the study of the castles' building history until 1961, and his construction sequence and reconstructions have largely been overturned by the archaeological work reported in 2023. The ruin is a listed heritage monument in Thuringia, and with its castle museum and the monument on the Oberburg it counts among the most heavily visited destinations in Germany.